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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25228 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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Perhaps I’m playing devil’s advocate, but the assassination’s significance was immediately noticed.

War Declared By Austria Against Servia; Russia Will Help Serbs To Resist Invasion; Germany Rejects British Mediation Proposal

The Washington Post, 14 July, 1914.

Sure, but imagine you pulled a list of the names of the British soldiers who died in the battle of the Somme. Do you think that if you went back in time to January 1914 and asked them for their thoughts on Archduke Ferdinand, the majority of them would have the slightest idea who you were talking about? I'm quite confident the default response would be something to the effect of "never heard of him, nothing to do with me". Maybe some of them would have been vaguely aware of who he was in the same way that I know the leader of France is named Emmanuel Macron, but surely the majority would never be able to foresee a future in which Ferdinand's death directly leads to their own.

I'm not saying that anyone living in the UK is likely to die as a direct result of the conflict in Palestine escalating. I'm simply trying to illustrate that you never actually know which world events will eventually end up affecting you, and it isn't hard to end up with egg on your face. And if I was trying to pick an example of a global issue which has a negligibly small chance of affecting me personally, the conflict in Palestine wouldn't be at the top of my list.

Maybe some of them would have been vaguely aware of who he was in the same way that I know the leader of France is named Emmanuel Macron, but surely the majority would never be able to foresee a future in which Ferdinand's death directly leads to their own.

Frank Ferdinand was de jure commander in chief of the Austrian military(as was at that point the norm for Austrian crown princes) and asking a British soldier ‘how does the top Austrian field marshal’s death possibly relate to your own’ would not seem terribly implausible even if the chain of causes would probably be wrong.

Sure, but lots of soldiers who died in the Somme weren't soldiers in January 1914 - a million men enlisted between August 1914 and January 1915, and the UK introduced conscription in 1916.

‘How does an Austrian field marshal’s death lead to yours’ has a pretty obvious answer for a British man in early 1914, though- I go into the army during a war.

Try asking young American men how a high ranking Russian/Chinese/Iranian military officer’s death could be connected to theirs. Most could point to an at least plausible chain of causality, even if they’re not that geopolitically aware.

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